Japanese BBQ Pork Belly, or A Reintroduction

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I don’t know why it has taken me so long to start posting about cooking. I’ve been on Steemit for well over a year, and I’ve only posted music and the occasional photo. I suppose it’s partly because I stopped working as a chef for a few years until recently. I was learning to be a woodworker, which was awesome, but life has brought me back around to doing what I’m best at. Now I’m in a new place, working as sous chef for my old friend Jason, with the freedom to create and do basically whatever I want as long as it makes money. I’m going to post recipes and lessons on Steemit, but this post is more of an introduction to me as a chef than it is about teaching.

So this past Sunday we participated in an event called Gourmet Sampler, which is a chance for all the restaurants and caterers in our small town to show off their stuff. Guests buy a ticket and get one bite or sample from every booth. Each booth had to be prepared to serve 700 bites. So Jason did 350 mini chicken tacos, and I did 350 pork belly bites.

Jason told me to not worry too much about cost, just come up with something impressive. Show yourself off, is what he said. I wanted to do a tuna poke sort of thing, but buying sashimi-grade tuna in southern Colorado is not an endeavor I suggest undertaking. I decided to do the same Japanese flavors I was thinking of with pork belly instead of tuna. It worked out great.

So here’s what I made: Roasted pork belly with crispy skin over a fried wonton, daikon tossed in sake vinaigrette, orange honey soy glaze, and Korean radish kimchi.

The pork belly is seasoned with salt, sugar, and sichimi togarashi (a Japanese spice blend with hot peppers). It’s roasted, and every single bite-sized piece that I cut has crispy skin on it. I had recently had crunchy pork skin on a roast at a Puerto Rican restaurant back home in Florida, and I wanted that little piece of hard meat candy to be part of every bite.

_{Ideally I would have had just a few large pork belly slabs to roast, but I had to buy every type of cut of pork belly they had at the Asian market in order to get the weight I needed. It all had skin, which was the most important thing.}

The pork belly is sitting on a slice of raw daikon tossed in sake vinaigrette. This is probably my favorite vinaigrette I’ve come up with over the years. Sake reduction, mirin, aged rice wine vinegar, shallots, garlic, ginger, red bell peppers, cilantro, black pepper, salad oil. Maybe a little salt. There is some technique involved, but I’m not writing a recipe here. If you’re interested in the full recipe, let me know in the comments and I’ll write a post for it.

The orange honey soy glaze is like a Japanese version of barbecue sauce. Well, it’s my recipe, so I guess it’s more like my version of a Japanese version of bbq sauce. I’m from the South, so if there’s one thing I know, it’s bbq sauce. For this glaze I started with two bottles each of Pearl River Bridge light and dark soy sauce. Reducing soy sauce to a glaze is kind of tricky. When you reduce (evaporate) things, you increase the saltiness. Soy sauce is, obviously, very salty already. I haven’t seen any recipes for soy glaze that address these difficulties, it’s something I’ve had to figure out myself through a few wasted gallons of soy sauce and advice from other chefs. Maybe in the future I’ll make a post on soy glaze and go through exactly how to do it, if anyone is interested. Anyway, the other ingredients are fresh-squeezed orange juice, sake, mirin, blood orange balsamic glaze, and local Colorado honey. It’s got all the flavor components of a bbq sauce except for heat: Sweet, salty, and tangy.

_{This is the most common type of kimchi (not the kind I used on the pork belly). Funkier than James Brown, with a heat level that will blow the back of your head out. Nobody was very happy with me while I was making this.}

Kimchi, of course, is pretty much the official food of Korea. Kimchi is a fermented dish that can be made with many vegetables, but the most common is cabbage. Regular kimchi is spicy and funky. The funk comes from fish sauce, or traditionally raw oysters. Another type of kimchi is white radish kimchi, which omits the spice and fish sauce. It’s a light, refreshing, palette cleansing pickle, as opposed to the delicious fiery rot that is kimchi. My first assignment in the Army was a year in South Korea, so I love that fiery rot. Makes me homesick in a weird way. But there is no way I'm putting it on my pork belly that I'm feeding to the Canon City public. I'd get run out of town.

_{White radish kimchi}

This white kimchi has Korean radish as the main ingredient, with scallions, garlic, and my addition of habanero peppers with no seeds, so there’s just the slightest hint of spice in the aftertaste (and an orange color that looks great with the white radish and green onions). It sits in a simple brine of salt and sugar, and only takes two days until it’s ready to eat. When it came time to make the small bites, I drained the kimchi and mixed it with red and orange bell peppers, orange zest, and green onions to make a multicolored garnish. A little pinch of this on top of the pork belly, and my little Japanese-Korean fusion experiment is done.

How does it taste, you ask? Well, pretty awesome if I do say so myself. Like Japanese meat candy. Jason and I were the most popular booth at the event, and literally only four people (I counted) turned up their nose at the mention of pork belly, so I’d say it was a success.

If you enjoyed this, please stay tuned for more. As I said earlier, I will be posting recipes and lessons. I will teach you things you won’t find in any cookbook. I even got a ridiculous-looking setup so I can attach my phone to my head and record video while I cook. I’m also into photography, so you’ll get some nice shots along with the recipes. And if you don't already know me through music, well, that's the reason I got on Steemit in the first place. The only thing I've been doing lately on Steemit is @luzcypher's Steemit Open Mic (which I HIGHLY recommend you check out if you are a musician - it's the best community on Steemit), but I'm about to be putting out some new original studio recordings in the next few weeks. I've been making huge positive changes in my life, which has made it hard to give Steemit my all, but everything is falling into place and picking up steam (pun intended). So this is kind of a new kickoff. Love you guys, and see you next post!

All photos by Paul Hallman